Andrew Fastow

While there, he met his future wife, Lea Weingarten, daughter of Miriam Hadar Weingarten (a former Miss Israel 1958), whom he married in 1984.

Fastow and Weingarten both earned MBAs at Northwestern University and worked for Continental Illinois bank in Chicago.

Both he and his wife attended Congregation Or Ami, a conservative synagogue in Houston where he taught Hebrew School.

While at Continental, Fastow worked on the newly emerging "asset-backed securities".

The practice spread across the industry "because it provides an obvious advantage for a bank", noted the Chicago Tribune.

"It moves assets off the bank's balance sheet while creating revenue."

Andrew Stuart Fastow (born December 22, 1961) is an American convicted felon and former financier who was the chief financial officer of Enron Corporation, an energy trading company based in Houston, Texas, until he was fired shortly before the company declared bankruptcy.

Fastow was one of the key figures behind the complex web of off-balance-sheet special purpose entities (limited partnerships which Enron controlled) used to conceal Enron's massive losses in their quarterly balance sheets.

By unlawfully maintaining personal stakes in these ostensibly independent ghost-entities, he was able to defraud Enron out of tens of millions of dollars.

Fastow graduated from Tufts University in 1983 with a B.A. in Economics and Chinese.

In 1984, Continental became the largest U.S. bank to fail in American history until the seizure of Washington Mutual in 2008.

Due to his work at Continental, Fastow was hired in 1990 by Jeffrey Skilling at the Enron Finance Corp. Fastow was named the chief financial officer at Enron in 1998.

Deregulation in the US energy markets in the late 1990s provided Enron with trade opportunities, including buying energy from cheap producers and selling it at markets with floating prices.

Andrew Fastow was familiar with the market and knowledgeable in how to play it in Enron's favor.

This quickly drew the attention of then chief executive officer of Enron Finance Corp Jeffrey Skilling.

Skilling, together with Enron founder Kenneth Lay, was constantly concerned with various ways in which he could keep company stock price up, in spite of the true financial condition of the company.

Fastow designed a complex web of companies that solely did business with Enron, with the dual purpose of raising money for the company, and also hiding its massive losses in their quarterly balance sheets.

This effectively allowed Enron's audited balance sheet to appear debt free, while in reality it owed more than 30 billion dollars at the height of its debt.

While presented to the outside world as being independent entities, the funds Fastow created were to take write-downs off Enron's books and guaranteed not to lose money.

Yet, Fastow himself had a personal financial stake in these funds, either directly or through partners amongst them Michael Kopper.

Kopper, Fastow's chief lieutenant, pleaded guilty to taking part in a scam with Fastow that defrauded Enron shareholders of many millions.

While defrauding Enron in this way, Fastow was also neglecting basic financial practices such as reporting the "cash on hand" and total liabilities.

Fastow pressured some of the largest investment banks in the United States, such as Merrill Lynch, Citibank, and others to invest in his funds, threatening to cause them to lose Enron's future business if they did not.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into his and the company's conduct in 2001.

Fastow was sentenced to a six-year prison sentence and ultimately served five years for convictions related to these acts.

His wife, Lea Weingarten also worked at Enron, where she was an assistant treasurer; she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering conspiracy and filing fraudulent income tax returns, and was sentenced to 12 months in prison despite a plea bargain which proposed she serve five months in jail, and 5 months in home-detention.

Fastow was born in Washington, D.C. He grew up in New Providence, New Jersey, the son of middle class Jewish parents, Carl and Joan Fastow, who worked in retail and merchandising.

Fastow graduated from New Providence High School, where he took part in student government, played on the tennis team, and played in the school band.

He was the sole student representative on the New Jersey State Board of Education.

In August, Skilling, who had been promoted to CEO of the entire company in February 2001, abruptly resigned after only six months, citing personal reasons.

When reporters for The Wall Street Journal discovered an Enron "senior officer" had recently sold his interest in several partnerships that had done business with Enron, they initially thought that officer was Skilling.

However, Enron spokesman Mark Palmer revealed that the "senior officer" was actually Fastow.

After a former Enron executive leaked a copy of the offering memorandum for one of Fastow's partnerships, LJM–named for Fastow's wife and two sons–to the Journal, reporters bombarded Enron with further questions about the partnerships.

The scrutiny died down after the September 11 attacks, but ramped up anew two weeks later with pointed questions about how much Fastow had earned from LJM.

This culminated in a series of stories that appeared in the Journal in mid-October detailing the "vexing conflict-of-interest questions" about the partnerships, as well as the huge windfall he had reaped from them.

On October 23, during a conference call with two directors delegated by the board, Fastow revealed that he had made a total of $45 million from his work with LJM–a staggering total, since he claimed to spend no more than three hours a week on LJM work.

On October 24, several banks told Enron that they would not issue loans to the company as long as Fastow remained CFO.

The combined weight of these revelations led the board to accept Lay's recommendation to remove Fastow as CFO on October 25, replacing him with industrial markets chief and former treasurer Jeff McMahon.

He was officially placed on leave of absence, though the board subsequently determined that it had grounds to fire him for cause.

It was later revealed that Fastow had been so focused on creating SPEs that he had neglected the most rudimentary aspects of corporate finance.